neighbors

The week Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and five Dallas police officers were shot and killed, my friend, Logan, pulled out a mixing bowl and a recipe, turned on her oven, and made a batch of blueberry lemon squares. When the squares had cooled, she cut them, arranged them on a plate, and wrote out a card.

“Dear Neighbor, we have never met, but I want you to know that for the past year I have been praying for you every time I drive by your home,” the note read in part.

Logan then gathered her kids into her mini-van, drove across the bridge between her own primarily white neighborhood and the neighborhood comprised primarily of people of color across the way, and knocked on the door of the house she’d driven past and prayed for all year long.

Logan’s dream was to figure out a way for that bridge to connect more than divide. When Sue and Charles opened their door, Logan introduced herself, handed over the plate of blueberry lemon squares, and, after chatting for a bit, shared her vision with them.

By the time the conversation ended, the three had a plan to host a “Bridge Party” between their two neighborhoods – a block party during which neighbors who don’t ordinarily intersect will have the opportunity to get to know one another.

Because, as Logan pointed out, “To love our neighbors is so much better when we know our neighbors.”

It’s so much easier, isn’t it, to make broad statements about “us” and “them” when we don’t know the “them”? It’s so much easier to judge and generalize people when they are simply a nameless, faceless group – Blacks, Whites, Muslims, Christians, Atheists, Gays, Republicans, Democrats, Police Officers – than it is when the people in those groups become individuals with faces and names, stories and histories.

My friend Logan was right. To love our neighbors is better when we know our neighbors because knowing creates the potential for a richer, fuller experience. Knowing opens the way to relationship. But, honestly, to love our neighbors is also easier when we know our neighbors, because when we know a person, we more easily see ourselves in their story; we more easily see our commonalities, instead of our differences.

Logan left Sue and Charles’ home that afternoon with the beginnings of a collaborative plan to build a bridge between their two communities. She also left with an invitation: Sue offered to teach Logan how to make biscuits in Logan’s kitchen the following week. A few days later I saw the photo on Facebook: Sue and Logan, holding a tray of biscuits hot out of the oven.

The week Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and the five Dallas police officers were killed was a terrible week, a hopeless, despairing week fraught with anxiety and unrest, a week filled with political statements, angry rhetoric, and bitter exchanges on social media.

But for some, it was also a week of first, tentative steps toward real empathy, compassion, and relationship. It was a knock on a stranger’s door, a plate of blueberry lemon squares, a slightly awkward conversation that birthed the beginning of a new friendship.

I hear hope and love in that ordinary story. I hear God’s invitation to take a step with him toward bringing heaven to earth. Above all, I hear a call in that story to move from the general to the specific, from the nameless, faceless “them” into real relationship with our neighbors.

Last night at dinner a friend of mine expressed her exasperation and frustration over a neighborhood dispute. Long story short, the dispute — which was, as most disputes are, over something quite silly (a fence and a few feet of property) — had caused feelings of ill-will, tension and unrest between my friend and her neighbor and in the neighborhood generally.

From my perspective, as an observer viewing the situation from a distance, it all seemed unnecessary and, frankly, sad. Yet so often, this is what we do (and to be clear, I’m not immune). We sacrifice peace and harmony for the sake of our pride. We decide that this right here is the hill we are willing to die on.

I know how easy it is for a situation like my friend’s to snowball into an all-out war. I’ve been there. I’ve been that neighbor, that co-worker, that friend. I’ve dug in my heels and staked my life on the most ridiculous hills. And I’ve been in my friend’s position as well – on the defensive, reeling and scrambling to find a toe-hold.

The truth is, people are annoying. They hold opinions, beliefs, and values that are different from our own. They make decisions that affect us – decisions we don’t like. They say the most infuriating, inane things.

Sometimes we are the ones impacted by the annoying people.

Sometimes we are the annoying people ourselves.

But here’s the bottom line: annoying or not, God calls us to live in harmony with our neighbors – even the neighbors we don’t like. It’s hard work, this living in community with annoying people. It’s not fun. It’s not all hamburgers on the grill and cold bottles of beer in our hands.

Living in harmony calls for sacrifice. Sometimes it calls for laying down our pride, even when — especially when — we believe we are in the right. Living in harmony asks us to differentiate between a mountain and a hill, to know when to stake our lives, and when to wave the white flag.

Notice the exact words of this verse: “May God, who gives this patience and encouragement, help you live in complete harmony with each other, as is fitting for followers of Christ Jesus.”

Impossible, right? I mean, the neighbor is annoying, right? How is complete harmony possible with the annoying neighbor when even civil tolerance feels like a stretch?

Friends, that’s why this verse is a prayer. Paul knew we couldn’t live in complete harmony with our neighbors on our own. That’s why he prays to God on our behalf – May God, who gives us patience and encouragement (two key virtues, especially when it comes to annoying neighbors), help us live in complete harmony with each other.

It’s not easy to live in complete harmony with our neighbors, especially the annoying ones. But nothing is impossible with God.

I watched from my office window this morning as a man stopped in front of my house. He unlatched the door of the tiny turquoise structure that’s perched on a post outside the picket fence and ducked his head out of sight. When he resumed his walk, his Labrador straining the leash, golden river birch leaves falling at his feet, the man held a book in his hand.

From the moment I caught my first glimpse of a Little Free Library (LFL) – the one at the curb on Sheridan Boulevard, a miniature replica of the classic bungalow behind it — I was smitten. As the years passed and additional LFLs sprung up in neighborhoods around Lincoln, I grew more and more enchanted.

Back in 2009 Todd Bol of Hudson, Wisconsin, built a model of a one-room schoolhouse as a tribute to his mother, a former teacher who loved reading. He put it on a post in his front yard and filled it with books. His neighbors and friends loved it, so he made several more and gave them away. Six years later, it’s estimated there are approximately 25,000 Little Free Libraries worldwide.

Last month, I decided I wanted LFL #25,001 in my front yard.

“It says right here you can make one in a weekend,” I said to Brad, as I scrolled through sample blueprints online. “Come on, it’ll be fun,” I cajoled.

Needless to say, I must have missed the website’s fine print. Clearly they had carpenter, not English professor, in mind when they suggested the LFL as a weekend project.

I cringe every time I read the story of the Good Samaritan. Not only at the priest who crosses to the other side of the road to avoid the injured man. Not only at the Levite who looks the other way when he glimpses the bloody, half-naked body. I also cringe at the reaction of the man listening to Jesus’ story, because I see myself most in him.

When Jesus tells the man that loving God and loving your neighbor is the key to eternal life, the man presses him further about his exact definition of “neighbor.”

“Looking for a loophole,” the man asks Jesus, “‘And just how would you define neighbor?’” (Luke 10:29, Msg.)

He wants Jesus to say, “Oh, you know, the old lady across the street…your colleague…the parents of your kid’s best friend.” He wants a small, cozy definition of neighbor.

That’s me. Looking for a loophole, trying to define “neighbor” in as limited a context as possible. I want my neighbor to be familiar. I want my neighbor to look and think and act pretty much like me. To share my same values, to promote a similar ideology, to believe in similar philosophies. I want my neighbor to be on the same page.

Why? Because it’s easier that way. More comfortable. Less fraught with conflict and anxiety and general ooginess. Because if my neighbor thinks pretty much like me and acts pretty much like me, I don’t have to question. My boundaries aren’t pushed. My comfortable little box of a life isn’t exposed. I can simply carry on, content, secure, unthreatened and above all, confident that I am right.

I’ve been reading about Dorothy Day recently for my 50 Women project. Dorothy founded the Catholic Worker movement back in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, when 13,000,000 Americans were out of work. She started what were called hospitality houses – the first one was her own tiny apartment in Brooklyn, where she lived with her young daughter. Dorothy fed and housed any person who knocked on her door for as long as they needed; no one was ever turned away. No one was ever told that they’d overstayed their welcome.

Later, after dozens of Catholic Worker houses had sprung up in cities around America, critics complained that Dorothy wasn’t serving the “deserving poor,” but drunks and lazy free-loaders instead. When a visiting social worker once asked Dorothy how long the “clients” were permitted to stay, she answered, “We let them stay forever. They live with us, they die with us, and we give them a Christian burial. We pray for them after they are dead. Once they are taken in, they become members of the family. Or rather they always were members of the family. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ.”

These brothers and sisters in Christ undoubtedly did not share all of Dorothy’s views – political, social, religious or otherwise. They undoubtedly said things that made her uncomfortable, or acted in ways that were unsavory or unacceptable. They undoubtedly challenged her opinions and perhaps even her faith.

But she took Jesus’ instructions “to love your neighbor as well as you do yourself” (Luke 10:27) literally. Her neighbors ate what she ate. They sat at the same table. They slept where she slept, in beds and on couches down the hall. They used her bathroom and brushed their teeth at her sink. Their children played with her daughter.

For Dorothy Day, there was no loophole. Because in her eyes, everyone was a brother or a sister in Christ.

So what about you? Do you cringe a little bit at Jesus’ expansive view of “neighbor?” Do you ever draw a line in the sand to differentiate between “neighbor” and “other?”

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She cups two hands around her mouth as we drive by, and I hear her voice through the open window, tank top stuck sweaty to my back: “I’ve got popsicles – come down!”

The boys jump out of the mini-van before I even turn the engine off. They skip up the sidewalk to the green house with the red chili pepper lights and plunk onto the front porch steps next to Oliver the orange cat.

“What color?” she asks, screen door snapping shut as she fans a rainbow. The boys mull like it’s the first time, every time.

By the time I reach the steps, all three slurp sweet ice from frigid plastic. We sit quietly, waiting to see if the downy woodpecker will cling to the suet feeder, if a hummingbird will swoop toward the scarlet globe and hover there like a giant bumble bee.

When they’re done, the boys slip the limp sheaths into the empty flower pot in the corner and lick sticky fingers clean. Rowan might hurl the plastic blue boomerang across the street once or twice. Noah might sprawl on the sidewalk, stroke Oliver’s fur warm from the sun.

Then they’ll scamper down the sidewalk while I linger, flip flops abandoned on the worn wood, bare feet tucked under the floral cushion, in the breezy shade of the front porch.

Primary Sidebar

Living out faith in the everyday is no joke. If you’re anything like me, some days you feel full of confidence and hope, eager to proclaim God’s goodness and love to the world. Other days…not so much.

Let me say straight up: I wrestle with my faith. Most days I feel a little bit like Jacob, wrangling his blessing out of God. And most days I’m okay with that. I believe God made me a questioner and a wrestler for a reason, and I believe one of those reasons is so that I can connect more authentically with others.